How to Make the Transition to Paleo

The Paleo diet is easier for some of us than it is for others. If you are eating a diet which consists mainly of sugar and carbs, particularly the really processed ones, the Paleo diet may sound like Kill-Joy's perfect way to get you wound up. Paleo experts suggest dropping your current diet and switching to 30-day trials without every food you've been used to, or a 30-day Reset. But what if you need to function at your best and can't function when you're body has been thrown into a place it hasn't met in, say, 10,000 years? And what if you've never cooked a chicken in your life? Don't run away, and don't bark back at Kill-Joy, who means well. Instead, try a proper transition, slow and steady. 

A 30-day trial is fine if you want to start seeing results quickly or you want to be aware of the real difference between how you felt on your old diet and how you will feel in 30 days. But what if you actually need to function during those 30-days? What if you are pushing your limits of activity? What if you can't take the 'carb flu', as I hear it's called, and either you need to keep going or you become extremely agitated when your body won't let you stay awake through the afternoon? And finally, what if you've never cooked in the manner advised by many of the meal plans online? What if you don't know how much the average supermarket chicken weighs and you've never had to squeeze its slimy legs into the oven before? A recipe with a long list of weird food preparation guidelines may be seriously off-putting for the five-minute kitchen spender or the person who is more familiar with the identically sliced meats in the cooked food aisle of the supermarket than he is with a very long kitchen knife. 

So, for anyone who even slightly fits into this category, try making smaller changes to your diet. Try experimenting with one recipe one day and another on a different day. Try slowly replacing your poorly formed, energy-depleting, high-carbohydrate, passed through thirty hands in a factory meal with something which looks like you could have hunted, caught, grown, or picked, yourself. And then evaluate the results so far.

Here's my best idea for making the transition. See what you think.

1. Protein comes from poultry, eggs, and meat. Only. That's actually a massive variety of sources.
• Get your poultry and your meat from the relevant 'fresh' aisles in the supermarkets. Choose grass-fet or organic where possible, but if not just go for something which requires cooking. The chicken breast fillets or the beef pieces in packets are fine. What you're doing right now is increasing the amount of poultry and meat you eat and buying ones which haven't been prepared, cut into shape, and depleted of nutrients. Seriously, turn over the packet and have a read of the ingredients. What does it say? Chicken? Beef? As expected? Right, now walk over to the cooked meats section. Pick up a packet of chicken. Turn it over. Read the ingredients. More than one? Anything you don't recognise? How comfortable do you feel now?
• For eggs, choose ones which are organic or where the packet says that welfare of the chickens was good. Not only will it stop you feeling guilty, it will taste better too.
2. Replace all 'carby' meals with their equivalent veg sources. Let's break this down:
• Want pasta or noodles? No problem. Just replace the pasta itself with zucchini, carrot, spaghetti squash or other starchy vegetable source. Grind down until it resembles noodles, or you can play around to make pasta shapes, and then boil, fry, or think of something new. Now add the sauce. Great.
• Want pizza? Make the bread out of flax and almond flour. 
• Want bread? Ditto.
• Cereal? Porridge? Oh my gosh, you have just reached the amazing Paleo meals! Nuts can make porridge. Did you know that? Nuts can make milk. Bet you didn't know that either. Combine an apple (without skin) and a pear in a blender, add maybe five almonds, and you have the same magnificence. You can also use buckwheat to make your own fabulous cereal. Try fresh fruit with almond milk for breakfast. Yum.
3. What have I missed?
4. If you do eat all the crap you're not supposed to eat (ehem, crisps, sweets, etc...chocolate is debatable), make these instead:
• Sweet potato chips (dehydrated in the oven)
• Other vegetable chips
• Smoothies, sweet porridges, and dried fruit (limited!) to get your sugar craving sorted.
5. No fizzy drinks. N.O. Make fresh fruit juices instead. 

---> Get that sorted, and you're on Transition Road! --->

Next, reduce the amount of carbs you are eating and increase the amount of protein. 

---> How are we doing? --->

Finally, vary the types of protein you are getting. Ensure that you have veg with every meal, and protein with every meal. Vary the amount of veg, too. 

---> And that's a wrap for now! --->

Just keep going!

The Smoothie Test

This is my first proper smoothie. By proper, I mean I actually spent time on it. It's genius. I mean, it's so genius that it had me sqeaking in excitement. It made two whole glasses worth! What a reward for all that hard work chopping one apple, a few strawberries, shoving lots of frozen fruit in a jug, and hitting the stir button on the food chopper. It's not my recipe: it's from 'Superjuice: Juicing for Health and Happiness,' by Michael van Straten. I added two mint leaves, because I thought it looked cool. But does Rusty like it?

Here it is: the yummy looking smoothie in a glass.

Here he comes. I think that's a sniff. I think that's a definite like!

And why wouldn't he?

It's just yum. And it passed the test!

Recipe:

• The recipe called for one cooking apple, but there just happened to be a Pink Lady apple sitting in the fridge, so I stole that.
• I couldn't find a scale (I know, I know: how do I live my kitchen days?) so I just took some leftover strawberries, some frozen mixed fruit, removing the blackberries, and some frozen mango (the recipe called for one whole mango, but I was all out), and some pineapple from a tin. The amount fit into a 1 litre measuring jug (right)
• I tipped half into a plastic bowl and used the food mixer. Then I poured this amount back in and mixed it all at once. This way it all fit. The final amount made just under 1 litre, or 2 tall glasses.

Experimental Mania

Some John West Salmon strips for dinner?

 I've been experimenting over the past month or so, scrapping my old diet and trying a lot of different foods. Here is a collection of simple meal ideas, all of which avoid wheat and were made in minimum time and with little effort. More detailed posts are coming soon, along with focused posts on specific foods/meals.

I'm not usually a prawn eater

Stir-fried beef with onions, plus some salad. Relatively simple

Not simple enough: I think this was cottage cheese, seeds, and a sprinkle of herbs

Fairly simple: two gluten free Mrs Crimble's corn cakes, a couple of brazil nuts (these are high in selenium. While this is good, apparently you shouldn't have more than one at a time. Okay).

Cottage cheese, seeds, a few nuts, and there's a couple of coconut chips there. Not simple enough.

Yoghurt and Tesco's Free From Pure Oat Fruit Muesli: yum. And highly addictive.

Yoghurt, banana pieces (max half a banana, and Tesco's Free From Pure Oat Fruit Muesli

My standard mid-morning snack on my old and new routine: freshly chopped strawberries and blueberries along with a handful of dried berries if available (cranberries, blueberries, or goji berries). This is a high Vitamin-C, high antitoxant, nicely packed tub of sugar, and easy to digest snack. Frozen fruit works okay too, but the liquid in it leaks through tuppaware, and fresh fruit is nicer and less sweet. The problem is keeping stocked-up on fresh fruit, and ensuring it doesn't go out of date.

As above

Quite crackers: The Food Doctor wholegrain Spelt crackers with a mixture of fresh and frozen veg and kidney beans. There's also one Mrs Crimble corn cake there. This was okay, but as you can tell from the sheer number of crackers, I was more interested in the carbohydrate factor. Those crackers are also quite addictive.

Tuna and kidney beans. Meh.

Munchy Seeds Omega Sprinkle and salad. As you can see, I had a preference for the seeds.

Stir fry: chicken with a mixture of fresh and frozen veg. Flavourings mostly came from lemon and sprinkles of herbs, but there may have been a few drops of sweet and sour sauce. Fried in olive oil. It was yum, but a bowl full on this routine is far too much food.

Leftovers in a pot. Too complex for my stomach.

Leftovers with almonds, and half a Mrs Crimble corn cake.

Salad with sunflower seeds.

Tinned tuna, chopped tomatoes, sweetcorn, and almonds. I had a thing for the almonds and scavenged for more later. Not the best snack/meal here.

Another salad with seeds and almonds.

A warm tuna salad with tuna, veg, chopped tomato, probably a few almonds, herbs, a squeezed lemon (or the juice from tinned lemon), and one Mrs Crimble corn cake, in little bits. Fairly good, though not 100% on the digestion factor.

Mid-morning snack alternative, after a morning cycle and trip to the gym: fresh fruit, crushed, and water. Give it a shake. You don't need a shaker. The seeds from the fruit simply collects on the sides of the bottle. But it's all the better if you eat them too.

More of Tesco's Free From Pure Oat Fruit Muesli, with some yoghurt. Just couldn't stop buying the muesli.

Frozen fruit mix from Tesco's, waiting to defrost.

Tesco Summer Fruits with an orange.

A big breakfast: yoghurt, strawberries, blueberries, and corn flakes. Making a breakfast of this size is unlike me. It was very nice, but too much.

An even bigger breakfast with less yoghurt, but a few dates. Yum, but sickening.

Plain times: corn flakes, freshly chopped stawberries, blueberries, and a couple of blackberries from frozen.

Yum. Two John West salmon fillets, and two Ryvita pumkin seeds and oats crisbread. These crispbreads are made from rye, not wheat, but many other products in the Ryvita range do have wheat flour in them. I can't find a link to the salmon, but I brought the product from the Co-Operative store.

Corn flakes, yoghurt, and half a Nature Valley Granola Bars Oat and Honey. This is what I call a "crash" snack...or what I have when I'm short of other ingredients, or time.

Another stir fry, with chicken and frozen veg as before, but also garlic and onions, as well as one Ryvita pumpkin seed and oats crispbread

Breakfast. I know, it's amazing. Salmon fillets and frozen veg. Simple, nice, and it didn't feel weird to eat this for breakfast once it was on my plate. The only question is how long it takes to digest.

Fish for breakfast, day two: one salmon fillet, warmed in the microwave, with veg from frozen, and one Ryvita pumkin seed and oat crispbread. Lovely, and I may be converted to fish for breakfast, but again the only question is how quickly I can get up and exercise after eating this. Does this food settle quickly enough?

Fozen veg and freshly chopped strawberries.

Evening snack: spinach from frozen, and one Ryvita pumpkin seed and oat crispbread.

Breakfast: one pot of Yeo Valley Natural yoghurt (their fat free version has extra sugar instead of the fat) with a raisin mix (correct product link to be confirmed; this one has vegetable oil listed in the ingredients), a few natural apricots (these brown apricots are high in iron and taste a lot better to the orange-coloured ones), and some freshly chopped strawberries.

On last year's diet I never ate more than half a pot of yoghurt at once. Hmm.

Five Stages of Health: Which Are You?

Health-seekers know what they're after, and they know when they've found it. 'It' is good health. 'It' is better health. 'It' is a chance to forget that they were ever seeking something in the first place. I can't think of a single health-seeker who wouldn't jump at the chance of becoming a health freerider. But that, unfortunately, is stage five. Which stage are you at?

THE LOST STAGE OF HEALTH: You have no idea what your alien body is doing, you don't understand your symptoms/condition(s), and you have no idea what to do about it all.

Enter the experimental stage of health: you start testing which foods are making you feel ill (if any); you start working out at which times you have the worst symptoms; you start recording when those symptoms occur; and you start trying different routines, diets, and activities.

You are now on a regimented routine or/and diet, but it's not really working. It requires huge amounts of effort to sustain, you keep having 'crash' afternoons or whole days, you keep getting it wrong, and you keep wanting to detox and start over, and over, and over again.

Your routine/diet is working. You feel good, you have more energy, you are happy with this near-'perfect' routine or diet, and you sit down for a meal out, happily annoucing that you have just swum or run a mile because everything is just so good right now. Your friends are impressed, so you sit there smugly and grin at the waiter: if you eat the 'wrong' food tonight, your stomach/body in general is in such a good place already that you probably won't even notice the mistake. Grin widely.

This is the pinnacle of your health journey: freeriding (symptom-free). You may have had a taste of this for a few days, or a week, or maybe even a month at a time, but now you are finally here and it seems like everything is pretty stable. You don't have to think about your routine or your diet: it seems second-nature to you. Your stomach hasn't rebelled in a long time and that means that you are more able to eat occassional meals out and not feel stressed or lost afterwards. Health freeriders no longer feel like there is a challenge surrounding their health or their diet. Good health...just happens.

Which stage are you at right now?